Luxury Hotel Tips From The Hazelton

The world's best hotel

Setting aside your own hotel, what is the best hotel in the world?

In Europe, I think it would be the Four Seasons Georges V hotel in Paris. I think that’s one of the greatest in the world. Their service is just breathtaking. I think in the U.S. there are many new hotel companies, like Mandarin Oriental, who have created fantastic hotels with an Asian spin on service where you have a very modern approach to the guest’s well-being. Then you have the grand old dames, like the Fairmont in San Francisco, the Peninsula hotels, the St. Regis hotels.

Getting a room at a booked hotel

Any tricks for getting into a booked hotel? When a hotel is full, is it really full?

Yes. I’m very much against overbooking. I think at a hotel of our caliber you should sell rooms if you have them, but if you can’t sell rooms because they’re fully booked, don’t sell them! Rather than overbooking, I will put you on a waiting list, and if there’s a cancellation I’ll call you — even if it’s day of. But I think there is nothing worse than to promise something and then to not deliver.

Will a hotel ever say that there are no rooms available when in fact there are?

Sometimes a hotel has to keep rooms available, for example if they have a loyalty program that guarantees availability to certain regular guests. At these hotels, if it’s high season in the city, the reservation department has to maintain a very fine balance. You’ll know that, on any given day, you might have as many as 20 of the guests who belong to the loyalty program wanting to book, so you have to keep rooms available. But you also know that if the platinum guests don’t show up, you won’t get revenue for the rooms you set aside for them. The safe route for a big hotel is to book more rooms than they actually have. You know from experience that some people will be no-shows. It’s always a fine line, and sometimes you win, and sometimes you have to tell guests that you’re overbooked and you have to book them into another hotel.

Will a hotel always find a guest a room elsewhere if they are overbooked?

I think that if a guest has a reservation in a hotel, especially in a five-star hotel, they have the right to a room. And if that hotel is overbooked, it’s the hotel’s responsibility to find them similar accommodations elsewhere. This is the original sense of hospitality: We provide you with a home — a bed, a bathroom and fantastic service. We don’t want to disappoint you — that’s the worst outcome. We know that if we make every guest happy, they will come back.

The hotel concierge

What does a hotel concierge do?

All high-end hotels have a concierge, and these are the people who really know the city intimately. So if you need tickets, dinner reservations, recommendations… these are the things you can ask of a concierge and save yourself a lengthy internet search.

At the luxury level, a concierge is usually a member of the Clefs d’Or, which is an international union of concierges. To become a Clefs d’Or concierge, you have to be trained by a Clefs d’Or concierge. You can identify a concierge as an official member by the golden keys he will have pinned to his lapel. Clefs d’Or is the French term for “golden keys,” and they are indeed the golden keys to the city. The concierge who has the Clefs d’Or can give you the keys to the city, because he has intimate knowledge of where all the hip spots are — the top restaurants, the newest shops. Clefs d’Or is an international organization, so you will find these concierges all over the world. Furthermore, their concierges are interdisciplinary; there are members who work for airlines, to help elite passengers make plans for the cities they are traveling to. At the Hazelton, we’re very fortunate: Out of five concierges, we have three that are part of the Clefs d’Or group.

All concierges always try to be on top of what is new and what is exciting, or whatever might trigger a guest’s fancy. There’s also the question of opinion. One concierge will have a different opinion about restaurant recommendations than another concierge in the same hotel. And that makes it interesting, because it’s not canned advice; it’s not always the same tips. For example, I know that a certain restaurant always has the freshest oysters on Tuesdays. And Amy, our head concierge here at the Hazelton, knows that another restaurant purchases a certain specialty fish on Thursdays. So you as a guest will get pointed in different directions on different days.

That being said, we do recommend certain things over and over because we know that they’re good, and we don’t want to embarrass you! If you are hosting a business dinner or a social function and you don’t know the city, we don’t want to run the risk of embarrassing you as a guest and we don’t want to embarrass ourselves as well! So in these instances we will recommend the safe things.